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Abstract

Organizational changes and interpersonal conflicts at work are topics that have been shown great interest in the research literature. Despite the fact that there has been identified a relationship
between these phenomena, the attention has mainly been directed towards these phenomena
isolated from each other. Hence, the aim of this study will be to examine the causal relationship between organizational changes and conflict by investigating these phenomena over time. We will also examine if there exists different patterns of relationships between work environment
changes, downsizing, supervisor conflicts and coworker conflicts over time. A retrospective panel study based on a national sample of the Norwegian workforce (N = 1186) from 2005 and 2007 will be used.
Autoregressive cross-lag analysis identified a reciprocal, but moderate, causal relationship between organizational changes and interpersonal conflicts over time. The strength of the relationship is relatively equivalent, where the prediction from organizational change to conflict
is β .08, and the prediction from conflict to organizational change is β .09. The results further identified an existence of different patterns of relationships between the sub categories. The findings show that work environment changes and downsizing predicts supervisor conflicts, but
they do not predict coworker conflicts. Moreover it was identified that both supervisor conflicts and coworker conflicts predicts work environment changes. Coworker conflict is the only variable that predicts downsizing. More research with shorter time intervals and more frequent measurements is necessary to better clarify the dynamics between these phenomena.